PowerCLI is the best tool for automating management and configuration of VMware vSphere

Tag Archives: vSphere

Following the last videos showing an introduction to PowerCLI and Reporting in PowerCLI there is now a new video that takes you through managing the virtual machine lifecycle with PowerCLI, these videos are a fantastic, quick way to learn PowerCLI tips and tricks.

Administrators are no longer responsible for managing single digit servers, they now have hundreds or even thousands to maintain. The automation capabilities of PowerCLI allow you to manage the lifecycle of a single virtual machine, or a large number of virtual machines, by using custom scripts.

Every stage of the virtual machine lifecycle, from creation and modification to migration and deletion, can be automated with just a few lines of PowerCLI code. What’s more, the number of virtual machines that you are managing, has no significant impact on the complexity of the PowerCLI scripts that you need to use.

Watch the video

One of the great new features introduced in vSphere 5.1 was the ability to export and import the configuration of your vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) and port groups to a file.

This gives you a quick restore method in case of issues or misconfigurations and also allows you to copy the entire VDS or port group configuration to a new VDS. This feature is detailed by this VMware KB and is available via the vSphere Web Client, below you can see how we would do this via the web client:

Exporting the configuration with PowerCLI

With the introduction of the VDS cmdlets in PowerCLI 5.1 R2 we can also automate this process using the Export-VDSwitch and